Page:Two Sussex archaeologists, William Durrant Cooper and Mark Antony Lower.djvu/18

 School attained a high character, and under him, Mr. Cooper, for whom his tutor always entertained a high regard, early showed great intelligence, and made rapid progress in his studies. But from this ancient seminary, his only alma mater, he was perhaps too prematurely taken, for he was not more than fifteen years of age when he was articled as clerk to his father, and during his articles, although he may not literally have realised Pope's couplet, and have been—

he yet exhibited an early bias towards literature, but the severer Clio—modern scholiasts write the name Cleio—rather than those of her sisters who dallied with poetry in its various forms, was the Muse to whom his youthful heart was vowed, and unto whom, through life, his multifarious labours were chiefly dedicated. History—history in its topographical and archaeological phases—was the study in which he delighted, and he was not out of his teens ere the history and antiquities of his native town and county engaged his constant and serious attention, and as time rolled on, he made himself familiar with those of most of the Sussex families of any local importance. He not only materially assisted Mr. Horsfield in the compilation of his History of Sussex, but, while he was not an author on his own account, at so early an age as his friend Lower, still, by the time he had completed his twenty-second year, that is in 1834, he had contributed a valuable supplement to Mr. Horsfield's work, under the title of The Parliamentary History of the County of Sussex, and of the several Boroughs and Cinque Ports therein. This Parliamentary history of his native County, which was also issued in a separate form, compressed into fifty-three double-column quarto pages of very small type, would readily fill a respectable octavo volume, and, as to the way in which it is executed, would reflect credit, both for its painstaking and research, upon the most experienced historian.